Blog

A YouTube video that claims Facebook is 'stealing billions of views' is going viral

12 Nov 2015

A YouTube video that accuses Facebook of "stealing billions of views" is going viral and receiving a ton of support from content creators and prominent tech executives.

The video, created by the Munich-based YouTube channel and design studio Kurzgesagt, was released on Monday, shortly after Facebook announced it was generating 8 billion video views each day. Kurzgesagt's video has gotten more than 1.1 million YouTube views in that time.

Here are the main accusations of the fast-paced, five-minute animated video:

In the first quarter of 2015, 725 of the 1,000 most viewed videos on Facebook were "stolen" from the original content creators and re-uploaded to Facebook's native video player. Kurzgesagt said this amounted to 17 billion stolen views in the period.

The video says freebooting, or the stealing of videos, is happening more and more often. It's bad for content creators as they receive next to no exposure or revenue for their videos — "only the thief and Facebook profit."

Facebook "rig[s]" its algorithm so the videos uploaded to its player are preferred to YouTube links. In other words, you're more likely to see a Facebook video in your News Feed than a YouTube video.

Kurzgesagt says Facebook "cheats" because a video "view" on Facebook counts after three seconds of a video is played, even if the video is autoplaying and on mute as a user scrolls through his or her News Feed. (YouTube doesn't disclose its view metrics. With video ads, it counts a video view as when a user engages with the content, or if a user has watched 30 seconds or more, or if someone has watched to the end of a shorter video. The internet advertising industry's standard for a viewable video ad impression is that at least 50% of the video is in view for two consecutive seconds or more — so Facebook is actually ahead of the industry, by one second at least.)

The video says the process of claiming copyright infringement is clunky compared with YouTube's Content ID system. And it complains that the thief "doesn't have to fear negative consequences at all." The narrator adds: "It just feels like a violation to be treated like that."

Facebook declined to comment on the Kurzgesagt video, however it has publicly addressed the issue of freebooting on its platform before.

Facebook does use a system called Audible Magic to detect copyright-infringing videos, and it has a system in which users can flag freebooted videos. And the company says users who make repeated copyright infringements may find their accounts suspended.

Facebook published a blog post about video management, in which it mentioned freebooting, in August. The company said it had heard from some video publishers that there were ways in which it could be doing a better job and that it was taking steps in response. In addition to employing Audible Magic, Facebook has been building video-matching technology that will be available to a "subset of creators."

Facebook was challenged over the issue of video copyright infringement by popular YouTube star Hank Green back in August, in a Medium post entitled "Theft, Lies, and Facebook Video."

In response, Matt Pakes, who works in Facebook's product team, wrote his own Medium post outlining that people at the company "absolutely do care" about digital video creators and that it takes intellectual property rights "very seriously." He explained that people tend to interact slightly less with non-native videos and that the three-second view count signals to Facebook that users are not simply scrolling through the feed and that they've shown intent to watch that video.

Nevertheless, freebooting is still clearly a problem on Facebook, and many prominent content creators and executives have been voicing their support for the Kurzgesagt video and sharing it on Twitter. People have been complaining about copyright infringement on Facebook, and the celebrities who have engaged in it, for months.